Earth at Risk

Description

“In America, four hundred people own the wealth of more than half of the American population. We should not be saying tax the rich, but instead we should be saying take their money and redistribute it, take their property and redistribute it.”
—Arundhati Roy

Industrial civilization is devouring the planet and the future. The oceans are acidifying, whole mountains have been laid to waste, and the climate is teetering into chaos. Every biome is approaching collapse. And fifty years of environmentalism hasn’t even slowed the rate of destruction. Yet environmentalists are not considering strategies that might actually prevent the looming biocide we are facing.

Until Earth at Risk.

Earth at Risk: Building a Resistance Movement to Save the Planet is an annual conference featuring environmental thinkers and activists who are willing to ask the hardest questions about the seriousness of our situation. The conference is convened by Derrick Jensen, acclaimed author of Endgame, who has argued that we need a resistance movement against civilization itself.

The twelve people in this volume present an impassioned critique of the dominant culture from every angle: William Catton Jr. explains ecological overshoot; Thomas Linzey gives a fiery call for community sovereignty; Jane Caputi exposes patriarchy’s mythic dismemberment of the Goddess; Aric McBay discusses historically effective resistance strategies; and Stephanie McMillan takes down capitalism. One by one, they build an unassailable case that we need to deprive the rich of their ability to steal from the poor and the powerful of their ability to destroy the planet. These speakers offer their ideas on what can be done to build a real resistance movement, one that includes all levels of direct action—action that can actually match the scale of the problem.

Earth at Risk includes:

• Derrick Jensen, author of Endgame, A Language Older than Words, and many others.


• Lierre Keith, author of The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability; coauthor of Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet.


• Nora Barrows-Friedman, journalist and photographer; correspondent for outlets such as The Electronic Intifada, Al Jazeera, and Truthout.org.


• Jane Caputi, author of The Age of Sex Crime; Gossips, Gorgons, and Crones: The Fates of the Earth; and Goddesses and Monsters: Women, Myth, Power and Popular Culture.


• William Catton Jr., sociologist, author of Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, and Bottleneck: Humanity’s Impending Impasse.


• Gail Dines, a founding member of Stop Porn Culture, author of Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality.


• Thomas Linzey, executive director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund.


• Aric Mcbay, coauthor of Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet.


• Stephanie Mcmillan, cartoonist; author of The Beginning of the American Fall; organizer for the anti-capitalist/anti-imperialist collective One Struggle.


• Riki Ott, marine biologist, author of Not One Drop: Betrayal and Courage in the Wake of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill.


• Arundhati Roy, author of An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire; Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers; and many others.


• Waziyatawin, historian and anti-colonial activist, author of For Indigenous Eyes Only; What Does Justice Look Like? The Struggle for Liberation in Dakota Homeland; and other books.

Sujets

• Deep Green Resistance
• Deep ecology
• Climate change
• Environment
• Culture

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 01 août 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781604868197
• Langue: English

Extrait

Earth at Risk: Building a Resistance Movement to Save the Planet
Edited by Derrick Jensen and Lierre Keith
© 2013 Derrick Jensen and Lierre Keith
ISBN: 978-1-60486-674-2
LCCN: 2012913623
This edition copyright ©2013 PM Press
All rights reserved.
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Flashpoint Press
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PM Press
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Layout by Jonathan Rowland
Cover art by Stephanie McMillan
Printed on recycled paper by the Employee Owners of Thomson-Shore in Dexter, Michigan.
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Contents
Derrick Jensen
William Catton Jr.
Jane Caputi
Riki Ott
Nora Barrows-Friedman
Gail Dines
Thomas Linzey
Waziyatawin
Lierre Keith
Stephanie McMillan
Aric McBay
Arundhati Roy
Q&A with Arundhati Roy and Derrick Jensen
About the Participants
Introduction by Derrick Jensen
"This collection of discussions is about the shift in strategy and tactics that has to happen if we want to build an effective resistance. It is about putting our bodies and our lives between the industrial system and life on the planet. It is about fighting back."
The dominant culture is killing the planet. It is long past time that those of us who care about life on earth begin to take the actions necessary to stop civilization from destroying every living being.
By now we all know the statistics and trends: 90 percent of the large fish in the oceans are gone, 97 percent of native forests have been destroyed, as have 98 percent of native grasslands. There is ten times as much plastic as phytoplankton in the oceans. Amphibian populations are collapsing, migratory songbird populations are collapsing, mollusk populations are collapsing, fish populations are collapsing, and so on. Have you noticed that you don’t have to clean your windshield nearly as often as you used to? Even insect populations are collapsing. Two hundred species are driven extinct each and every day.
This culture destroys landbases. That’s what it does . Iraq used to have cedar forests so thick that sunlight never touched the ground. One of the first written myths of this culture is about Gilgamesh deforesting the hills and valleys of Iraq to build a great city. The Arabian Peninsula used to be oak savannah. The Near East was heavily forested. We’ve all heard of the cedars of Lebanon. Greece was heavily forested. North Africa was heavily forested. This culture destroys landbases, and it won’t stop doing so because we ask nicely. We don’t live in a democracy. Think about it: do governments better serve corporations or living beings? Do judicial systems hold CEOs accountable for their destructive, often murderous acts?
Here are a couple of riddles that aren’t very funny. Question: What do you get when you cross a long drug habit, a quick temper, and a gun? Answer: Two life terms for murder, earliest release date 2026. Question: What do you get when you cross two nation states, a large corporation, forty tons of poison, and at least eight thousand dead human beings? Answer: Retirement with full pay and benefits. That’s what happened to Warren Anderson, CEO of Union Carbide, which caused the mass murder at Bhopal.
Here’s another way to say this: What do you call someone who conspires to put poison in the subways of Tokyo? You call him a terrorist and you put him in prison for life. What do you call someone who conspires to put poison in the groundwater of the United States? You call him Dick Cheney. Or oil and gas man, or fracker. Do the rich face the same judicial system as you or I? Does life on earth have as much standing in a court as does a corporation? We all know the answers to those questions. And we know in our bones, if not always our heads, that this culture won’t undergo any sort of voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living.
If you care about life on the planet and if you believe the culture won’t voluntarily cease to destroy it, how does that belief affect your methods of resistance? Most of us don’t know because most of us don’t talk about it.
At the Earth at Risk conferences of 2011 and 2012, leading environmental activists and thinkers gathered to talk about it. This collection of discussions from those days is about the shift in strategy and tactics that has to happen if we want to build an effective resistance. It is about putting our bodies and our lives between the industrial system and life on the planet. It is about fighting back.

Those who inherit whatever is left of the world once this culture has been stopped, whether through peak oil, economic collapse, ecological collapse, or the efforts of brave women and men resisting in alliance with the natural world, are going to judge us by the health of the landbase, by what we leave behind. They’re not going to care how you or I lived our lives, how hard we tried, or whether we were nice people. They’re not going to care whether we were violent or nonviolent. They’re not going to care whether we grieve the murder of the planet. They’re not going to care whether we were enlightened or not enlightened.
They’re not going to care what sort of excuses we had to not act. I’m too stressed to think about it. It’s too big and scary. I’m too busy. Those in power will kill me if I act against them. If I fight back, I run the risk of becoming like they are. But I recycled. You can substitute any of a thousand other excuses we’ve all heard too many times.
Those who come after us are not going to care how simply we lived. They’re not going to care how pure we were in thought or action. They’re not going to care whether we voted Democrat, Republican, Green, Libertarian, or not at all. They’re not going to care if we wrote really big books. They’re not going to care whether we had compassion for the CEOs and politicians running the deathly economy. They’re going to care whether they can breathe the air and drink the water.
Every new study reveals that global warming is happening far more quickly than was previously anticipated. Scientists are now suggesting the real possibility of billions of human beings being killed off by what some are calling a "climate Holocaust." A recently released study suggests an increase in temperature of 16 degrees Celsius, or about 30 degrees Fahrenheit, by the year 2100. We’re not talking about this culture killing the planet sometime in the far distant future. This is the future that children born today will see and suffer in their lifetimes. Is this culture worth more than the lives of your own children?
In The Nazi Doctors , Robert Jay Lifton explored how it was that men who had taken the Hippocratic oath could lend their skills to prisons where inmates were worked to death or killed in assembly lines. He found that many of the doctors honestly cared for their charges and did everything within their power, which meant pathetically little, to make life better for the inmates. If an inmate got sick, they might give the inmate an aspirin to lick. They might put the inmate to bed for a day or two, but not for too long, or the inmate might be selected for murder. They might kill patients with contagious diseases to keep the diseases from spreading. All this made sense within the confines of Auschwitz. The doctors did everything they could to help the inmates, except for the most important thing of all: they never questioned the existence of Auschwitz itself. They never questioned working the inmates to death. They never questioned starving them to death. They never questioned imprisoning them. They never questioned torturing them. They never questioned poisoning them. They never questioned the existence of a culture that would lead to those atrocities. They never questioned the logic that leads inevitably to the electrified fences, the gas chambers, the bullets in the brain.
We as environmentalists do the same. We fight as hard as we can to protect the places we love using the tools of the system the best we can. Yet we don’t do the most important thing of all: we don’t question the existence of the whole death culture. We don’t question the existence of an economic and social system that is working the world to death, starving it to death, imprisoning it, torturing it. We never question the logic that leads inevitably to clearcuts, murdered oceans, loss of topsoil, dammed rivers, and poisoned aquifers. And we certainly don’t stop these horrors.
What do all the mainstream so-called solutions to global warming have in common? They take industrial capitalism as a given, and they operate on the assumption that the natural world must conform to industrial capitalism. That’s literally insane in terms of being out of touch with physical reality, because without physical reality without a real world you don’t have any economic system whatsoever. Any solution to global warming, any solution to any of these problems, has to take the real, physical world as a given, and understand that it is the social system that must conform to the real world.
I once asked an intelligent seven-year-old, "So what will it take to stop global warming, caused in great measure by the burning of oil and gas?" the seven-year-old answered, "Stop burning oil and gas!" And I said, "You are smarter than any environmentalist I’ve ever met." If you ask any reasonably intelligent thirty-five-year-old who works for a green, high-tech consulting corporation, you’re go